School of Physical Education and Sports, Selçuk University, Konya, Turkey. kmkilic@yahoo.com.tr
OBJECTIVES: The present study aims to investigate how exhaustion exercise affects thyroid hormones and testosterone levels in elite athletes who are supplemented with oral zinc sulfate for 4 weeks.
METHODS: The study included 10 male wrestlers, who had been licensed wrestlers for at least 6 years. Mean age of the wrestlers who volunteered in the study was 18.70 +/- 2.4 years. All subjects were supplemented with oral zinc sulfate (3 mg/kg/day) for 4 weeks in addition to their normal diet. Thyroid hormone and testosterone levels of all subjects were determined as resting and exhaustion before and after zinc supplementation.
RESULTS: Resting TT3, TT4, FT3, FT4 and TSH levels of subjects were higher than the parameters measured after exhaustion exercise before zinc supplementation (p<0.05).>
CONCLUSION: Findings of our study demonstrate that exhaustion exercise led to a significant inhibition of both thyroid hormones and testosterone concentrations, but that 4-week zinc supplementation prevented this inhibition in wrestlers. In conclusion, physiological doses of zinc administration may benefit performance.
MY TAKE: This is a two year old study but I was interested in researching Zinc because it is believed to be important is many things from preventing premature aging of the skin, helping the healing processes, reducing duration and severity of cold symptoms, to prostate function. ZMA is commonly taken in hopes of increasing testosterone and sleep but this study used only 3g/day of zinc sulfate and showed that it improved thyroid hormones and testosterone concentrations which are important to all people but especially athletes and those who train.
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6 comments:
Actually, you wrote the study said "3 mg/kg of bodyweight/day" which would end up for me - a woman of 130 pounds - needing 60mg (or about 6 grams a day). I don't know how much the wrestlers weighed but I'm guessing they had to take at least 6 if not more grams a day. Do you happen to have a link to the original study? Thanks!
Actually, Charlotte, your wieght at 130 lbs would equal about 60 Kg (lbs/2.2)so...at 3mg/kg...the dose for you would be 177 mg per day. 6 grams would be equivalant to 6000mg.
What a great study, it makes so much sense.
I really like this site, it's so important to know more about this topic, keep it up and of course every time I have time I'll love to check out again
Interesting thing to know, I do plenty of exercise, specially soccer and tennis, the occasional football of course.
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